Is anyone else starting to become a bit excited?

JJJJNR wrote: »

It's on one other with a btc/eth pairing. But it's easier to use the dex no KYC. Just buy some xlm on cb and send to the dex wallet.

JJJJNR wrote: »

No go to stellarport.io and download and install. Then register and note the wallet key. your done.. send the xlm from an exchange to the stellarport wallet. Go to exchange buy coins.

JJJJNR wrote: »

Sorry yes been a while since I've installed it.

I wouldn't leave my XLM on binance not your keys not your crypto .

London | Eleesa Dadiani is the 30-year-old scion of a 1000-year-old noble family from Georgia.
But this is one aristocrat, at least, who isn’t living in the past: based in London, she’s trying to establish herself as a baroness of the cryptocurrency realm – and her aim seems to be no less than world domination.
If you thought the bitcoin world was all tech nerds and shady darknet types, Dadiani is quite the corrective to the stereotype.

Eleesa Dadiani's eponymous syndicate wants to mop up bitcoin liquidity. 
Raised in Azerbaijan and Georgia, and a self-described “drop-out” from a series of boarding schools across Europe, she got into the crypto game through starting her own art gallery in London’s swanky Mayfair district.
The story involves pricey paintings, Russian sanctions, Formula 1 cars, thoroughbred horses, and lots of Chinese cash. She’s now about to hit the Eurasian silk road as she and her enigmatic Dadiani Syndicate look to stitch up exclusive deals with the world’s bitcoin miners and “mop up the liquidity” in the bitcoin market.

Her buyers want to own it all, while she herself says her goal is to pretty much single-handedly clean up and standardise the bitcoin system. And the thing is, she makes it all sound so strangely simple.
Dadiani’s crypto journey began in 2014, when her Moscow-based family was looking to offload some of its collection of fine art. She rented a space just off Regent Street in Mayfair, the luxury art dealers’ neighbourhood of choice.
Just as the first consignment of family treasures was due to leave Moscow, though, the West’s Crimea-related sanctions kicked in. “We had a shipment of 40 beautiful paintings that were essentially stuck. So I was left with a space. Bare walls,” she tells The Australian Financial Review.
She turned instead to a group of septuagenarian British painters whose work the world had “kind of forgotten ... a lot of them were in self-exile”. For a while it wasn’t a commercial success – “it was like a little museum, so to speak” – but well-known contemporary artists came in to see the work and eventually things looked up.
Can I pay for that in crypto?
Dadiani’s life-defining moment came when some of her customers started asking to pay her in bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.
She quickly realised that there were many wealthy people out there – particularly in countries like Russia, under sanctions, or China, with its tight capital controls – for whom bitcoin was their financial lifeline into the global economy.

They had bought into the digital currency, got rich during the bitcoin surge – a coin's value rose from $US1000 to over $US20,000 during 2017 – and now they wanted to crystallise it into real-world assets outside their restricted home turf.
So she started her eponymous brokerage, Dadiani Syndicate, to do the deals – whether it was buying a £10 million-plus London townhouse or a thoroughbred horse.
We’re talking about banks, sovereign wealth funds, large family offices, hedge funds – these are the players we’re entertaining now.
— Eleesa Dadiani
“We would broker anything from Formula 1 cars to blue-chip art pieces to property – anything, really,” she says.
London, it’s fair to say, has a bit of a reputation as a money launderette. So Dadiani is unsurprisingly at pains to emphasise that everything was above board.
“When a sanction is imposed, capital flight becomes the number-one foe,” she says.
“That was a difficulty, what people don’t realise is that transporting money is not synonymous with money laundering – no, there are a lot of legitimate businessmen who were deeply affected by this. They were not able to conduct business internationally when such drastic measures were in place.”

She admits she probably could have thought a bit more about the name of the company. “Yes, ‘syndicate’, I didn’t consider at the time that it’s got this narco [connotation],” she laughs. “It’s definitely not that, the reason behind it is to signify our relationships with different entities that perform different functions to make things happen.”
Dadiani Syndicate hadn’t been in operation long before competitors started to spring up. And the demand evolved, too: “People wanted fungibility, they didn’t want to offload their crypto and buy a house with it, they wanted immediate transfer into fiat.”
Also, the price of bitcoin was dropping fast: from $US20,000 around Christmas 2017 to just $US3747 a year later. And it was clear that big financial institutions were going to get into the game, dwarfing the demand from individuals. So Dadiani repositioned herself on the buy side of the bitcoin ledger.
“The whole purpose, as I understood it, for this prolonged correction, it was just to shake out unnecessary players – to move retail out so institutions could come in. We’re talking about banks, sovereign wealth funds, large family offices, hedge funds – these are the players we’re entertaining now.”
... **** is cleaner than these coins. So of course nobody is going to touch them.
— Eleesa Dadiani
Some of her clients were asking for 100,000 coins, 200,000 coins. And then she had a request from a buyer group to snap up 25 per cent of the bitcoin market. There are about 17.8 million bitcoins in circulation, so the order was worth about $US42 billion ($63 billion) on current prices. The order was impossible to fulfil, but “galvanising”, she says.
To go about acquiring bitcoin systematically, the market needed reordering. Out would go cowboy trades, facetious offers, and arbitrage plays; in would come “a procedure designed specifically to look after institutions, and to make sure that no single entity would have too large a chunk”.

She now wants to muscle out all the smaller over-the-counter (OTC) traders, and service the big appetite of the institutional market in a transparent and efficient way.
“When you go to exchanges, no one buys large quantities on exchanges, that’s not the way things are done. Liquidity is limited. Which OTC desk are you going to go to if you want to buy 100,000 coins today?”
Tapping the source
To hit the necessary scale, she wants to deal direct with the bitcoin miners – the companies that use huge banks of servers to conduct the complex mathematical computations that generate new bitcoins.
She’s prepared to supply them with hardware and support – whether it be sorting out cheaper energy, helping to build infrastructure, facilitating the sale of coins – and thereby lock them into working with her Syndicate.
“We want to mop up as much liquidity coming direct from mines, so we can act as a conduit to the wider crypto market,” she says.
There are challenges with her approach. Because of the way the bitcoin process is set up, there will only ever be a maximum of 21 million coins. So there's only about 3.2 million, or 16 per cent of the total, left to extract.
Around 1800 are mined each day, and tens if not hundreds of thousands of people are thought to be involved. But the rate at which they can be extracted periodically declines – it will halve in May next year. This might tamper with the economics of mining, although it depends what the "halvening" does to the bitcoin price.

Working directly with miners will satisfy her clients that they’re steering clear of the dark side of crypto, she says.
“The provenance of coin is the one thing that stops these trades from concluding. You have these seemingly legit sellers coming forth, you do your forensics on them, and I mean **** is cleaner than these coins. So of course nobody is going to touch them,” she says.
“So we want direct recourse to miners, access to virgin coins, so we can offer that, without batting an eyelid, to reputable institutions without any consequences.”
She says she’s as scrupulous with her buyers as she plans to be with her sellers. “There are certain jurisdictions that we’re very careful about trading. Certain sovereign wealth funds are problematic, because it’s very clear what they want to do with their money and that can be problematic for us," she says.
The business has been focused on North American and European clients, but now wants to raise its profile in "other untapped territories where there is tremendous crypto trading activity", such as the Middle East, East Asia, Russia and Central Asia.
She keeps coming back to the idea of a crypto system that’s standardised and transparent – “pristine”, she calls it – that is based on big, trusted institutions – and therefore doesn’t suffer from wild price volatility and shonky operators. She sees her role as laying the terrain – and taking the commissions.
Can she do it? Bitcoin was recently and memorably described in the Financial Times as “a blatherskite world”. And a vague air of the unexplained lingers around Dadiani and her Syndicate. But she certainly radiates confidence and clarity.
“I’m an opportunist. I’m not a specialist in anything, I’m a school dropout. I have a good nose for things, when something is about to gallop," she says. "And so twice I’ve now had good timing. Once when people needed to cash out of their holdings, when banks didn’t want to touch crypto; and now, when we are at the forefront of this institutional stampede.”

cnocbui wrote: »

I came across an article I found amusing, a bit whacky, but containing some gems of truth that coincide with what I have always thought was part of the scene that would continue to underpin the value of bitcoin. I would have linked to it but it's walled-off.

Bob24 wrote: »

Very hard to know what to make from those figures.

A bitcoin which an individual has been storing for 5 years in their wallet and a bitcoin which has been stored by an exchange in their wallet will both be counted as inactive coins in these stats. However while the first one is indeed not being traded by anyone, the second one could actually be changing hands several times a day on the exchange (it is showing as inactive as it remains in custody of the exchange, but the client of the exchange which is the actual owner is changing).

Dohnjoe wrote: »

I don't believe the dude pays his taxes, he openly brags about it anyway. Plus wasn't he wanted for murder at one stage?

He also seems to have been involved in the B2G Pyramid scheme (the Seagal one) promoting it

Dohnjoe wrote: »

I don't believe the dude pays his taxes, he openly brags about it anyway. Plus wasn't he wanted for murder at one stage?

Branson-backed cryptocurrency start-up launches a super-fast exchange to take on Coinbase